Crisis of Responsibility

by David L. Bahnsen

  There’s no mystery as to the source of angst for young college graduates in this new economy. Consider the following data points that make the case succinctly and dramatically:40

  *In the last ten years alone, total student debt has risen 250 percent.

  *Cumulative student loan debt now exceeds $1.4 trillion, greater than total national credit card debt and the total national mortgage debt—by a wide margin.

  *In the last ten years, the number of borrowers has increased 90 percent.

  *The average balance size has increased by 80 percent.

  *Roughly $1 trillion of new student loan debt has been added in just the last decade.

  These stunning figures coincide with the most difficult environment for young adults to find a livable wage in seventy-five years. They coincide with the highest percentage of young adults moving back in with their parents in seventy-five years. How bad is that reality? The percentage of twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-olds living with their parents is double what it was in 1964. Double! And it’s 33 percent higher than at the turn of the millennium.41 It’s interesting to note: as the unemployment rate for this age demographic was cut in half from 2010–2016, the percentage of those living at home increased 25 percent.42 This inverse correlation suggests that either new jobs don’t pay enough or perpetual adolescence has become the new normal.

  And is it mere coincidence that five pivotal swing states in the 2016 election where so much middle-class angst resides—Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—are in the top sixteen for debt per student?43

  What’s driving this explosion of student debt? Primarily, increased college expense is to blame. Why the stratospheric increase in the cost of college? The subsidy created by the easy availability of debt. Consequently, the vicious cycle damages the very people it was supposed to benefit. A college degree was portrayed as a key asset for young people looking to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Nearly infinite student loans were then made available so more people could have this key asset. The high demand coupled with infinite government loans gave universities free reign to raise tuition. And so it goes. As a result, college expenses skyrocketed many multiples higher than the base inflation rate, university administrator and bureaucrat salaries began to resemble those of elite CEOs, and average college graduate wages declined by 15 percent.44

  These underperforming, overvalued colleges feed the students’ sense of entitlement. Perhaps students would tolerate being roughed up a bit academically if they weren’t required to pay in excess of $250,000 to be there!

  Who’s to blame for this mess? There’s plenty of blame to go around—from the obnoxious federal loan subsidies that drive prices higher and indebt our young people at torturous levels, to the administrators and boards that have lost any concept of fiduciary duty to those they are supposed to educate. Let’s not forget the parents who enabled this national charade, perhaps to preserve their own pride.

  And universities don’t have to deal with the market force that would usually drive prices down—competition. Schools know every kid arrives with a government-backed checkbook; therefore, instead of focusing on academic rigor at competitive pricing, they focus on amenities and wasteful spending projects they think will make their school a student magnet.

  Young people are disgruntled today because they were sold a lie—a four-year degree will guarantee economic security. While that may have been true to some extent in the past, it changed when the university ceased to be a place for intellectual growth and increased productivity. A classically liberal education—one that better prepares the student for real life, stimulates their passions, and encourages them to wrestle with the great questions of life—has gone the way of the Hula-Hoop (and, coincidentally, the decline began around the same decade as the Hula-Hoop). As Charles Murray points out, there is still a compensation premium for college graduates over non-college graduates. The big question is why? It most certainly cannot and will not last.

  The monumental debt, and poor rationale for its existence, is made exponentially worse by the poor quality of the product itself. In his masterful work Fail U: The False Promise of Higher Education,45 Charlie Sykes meticulously walks readers through the decline in rigor, academic quality, and faculty—or teachers who even show up for class. Two courses a semester is considered an above-average teaching load now for a college professor (roughly five hours per week). Although based on the steady flow of horror stories about what gets taught when professors do show up, I suppose there’s something to be said for the absentee model of teacher aide–driven education. The only thing worse than a radical teacher being paid well not to teach is a radical teacher being paid well to teach humanistic extremism.

  Rethinking College

  Our pursuit of a free and virtuous society finds a significant obstacle in this higher education crisis. What’s at stake is that pivotal period in a young life where many are intellectually curious, craving new experiences, and dabbling with social freedom for the first time. Noble aims of a college-age experience should include developing marketable job skills, enhancing one’s ability to think critically, and discovering where one’s real passions and aspirations lie. Instead, academia insists on protecting its monopoly, as evidenced by tyrannical opposition to trade schools and technology-driven distance learning.

  Sadly, only one option remains to remove the present monopoly controlled by ideological leftists who coddle young adults—blow up the business model. With student debt growing exponentially, some form of dramatic default may be required to force stakeholders in the present system to make changes.

  In the meantime, each family has every right and responsibility to evaluate its own situation and conduct an analysis of costs versus benefits. Is rigorous worldview training in matters of life and philosophy the primary objective? Perhaps a smaller private or faith-based college is the right path. Does the prospective student have a clear idea of what they want to do professionally, where a trade school or niche training may be more valuable to achieve their underlying objective? Is the primary objective to gain the life experiences of the college years? If so, does everyone understand the debt ramifications and what post-college life might look like?

  In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for each family and young adult. In an era where free trade and immigration are often blamed for the entire plight of middle America, what we know is that skyrocketing college costs (completely separated from monetary or market conditions) have left an entire class of people unable to receive a college education. And those who do have access to it and incur the debt to get it are flat-out not receiving it. Instead, they’re incurring a quarter-million dollars of debt for a pat-on-the-back and a declining wage. Meanwhile, the true traits that lead to prosperity—character development, problem solving, resilience, and mature interpersonal skills—are ignored or shunned.

  The way forward begins with a renewed care for independent thinking. It starts with a genuine appreciation for the dignity of the individual as a person, not merely as a potential loan customer. It continues with letting technological innovations enter (and even disrupt) higher education. And it includes hitting the reset button on our culture’s attitude toward college.

  Purging a broken business model from the system will be hard enough; purging extremism and hostile ideology will be even harder. But, ultimately, the stakes are too high to ignore the damage being done by the present system. The cause of a free and virtuous society requires the courage to take this head-on.

  10

  GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE,

  FOR THE PEOPLE

  Why the Stunning Incompetence

  and Inefficiency of Big Government

  Is the People’s Problem

  There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority in exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal T
reasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.

  –PRESIDENT CALVIN COOLIDGE

  Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

  –PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

  –BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  I referenced author J. D. Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy in chapter 3. Its underlying plea is for conservatives to quit telling poor white America that government caused their plight. When I was growing up, I had always associated victimhood with the Left. It seemed to me that those blaming some force, entity, or movement for suppressing or preventing them from being their best selves were always on the political Left.

  However, the cultural addiction to blame I have focused on throughout this book has covered all comers, the usual bogeymen of both the Left and the Right. Unfortunately, championing victimhood has now become a bipartisan affair, although the identity of the targets shifts depending on one’s political party or ideology. Right-wing circles do have peripheral culprits for the plight of man (e.g., the Federal Reserve, labor unions, an overreaching judiciary), but the overarching villain in almost any right-wing narrative about the ills of society is the government—usually the federal government.

  Hence, it is my burden in this chapter to plead with my right-wing brethren to see big government for what it is: the consequence—and not the cause—of our problems.

  The foundation of conservative ideology is, indeed, limited government. The contemporary Left either forgets or dismisses the fact that our nation’s founders shared this vision. The founders’ genius was not to create a deliberately weak or an abundantly strong government, but rather to subject the government’s powers to checks and balances. They first acknowledged as core to our nation’s own soul that “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” They rooted the American experiment in the belief that government does not grant rights to man, but rather, man grants government its limited power. Man enjoys certain natural rights and forms governments to help secure those rights.

  The founders did not distrust government or suffer from some sort of government-abuse hangover merely as a reaction to the tyranny of King George III. Rather, America is an idea, a manifestation of a world-changing philosophical view—sovereignty belongs to the people alone. Not a monarch, not a feudal class, not a hereditary class—but to the people. It only makes sense that a society built around the idea of the state would grant the state unlimited power, but a society built around the natural and universal rights of humanity would limit the state’s power only to what is needed to secure those rights.

  Conservatives, at least as I use the term, seek to conserve this people-centered philosophy at the root of our nation’s founding. The founders envisioned a government held in check by its own constitutional limitations; thus, those who value conserving this philosophy today should share that political intuition.

  There are three primary structural forms for those constitutional limitations: (1) the checks and balances embedded in the three-branch system of government; (2) the enumeration of their powers in the Constitution; and (3) the delegation of powers to the individual states wherever powers were not specifically delegated to the federal government in the Constitution. To reiterate, the genius of the founders was both philosophical and administrative. It reflected their view of human nature, of natural law, and of natural rights; and it protected the people from abuses and overreach through procedural design.

  And all of it—all of it—depended on moral and responsible citizens.

  The Behemoth of Federal Government

  Any two conservatives are very likely to agree that a large and centrist federal government is outside the design of our country’s heritage. Where they may disagree is whether big government was the result of government taking on an excessive load (usurping), or the result of the people giving them an excessive load (dereliction of duty). Let’s start with a fact about which both sides of this debate can agree: the federal government is a monstrosity.

  As I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite things to do in Washington, DC, is to look out the windows at the top of the Washington Monument on each side (north, south, east, west). The caretakers of this national treasure provide visitors with a sort of “visual progression,” showing visitors decades of photographs to demonstrate how the view has changed over time. In each direction, visitors see a visual memorial of the growth of government, as plethora of federal government buildings, branches, offices, and infrastructure sprout up year after year, decade after decade.

  Unlike the growth of a successful corporation, the buildup of government facilities hasn’t been accompanied by greater results, better fiscal management, increased efficiency, or a more robust civic life. Rather, each additional bureaucratic layer brings more debt, dysfunction, and angst. Federal budget outlays were only $68 billion in 1952. They grew to $660 billion per year in 1981, and are now barely below $3.8 trillion per year (fig. 10.1).

  Figure 10.1

  Employees of government (federal, state, and local) now total over 22 million people. In a labor force estimated to be 160 million people, 14 percent of our workforce is employed by the government (fig. 10.2).

  Not surprisingly, fiscal conservatives bemoan our incomprehensible level of debt—about $20 trillion on our national credit card. Annual budget deficits between $400 billion and $1 trillion (each of the last ten years) intensify the fears of budget hawks. But perhaps most concerning is the percentage of the economy that federal spending now represents—fully 24 percent of national GDP (fig. 10.3). Federal spending has essentially doubled its role in the economy since the 1950s —even while the economy was dramatically expanding most of that time.

  Economists refer to this concern as the “crowding out” effect. It doesn’t require an economic textbook to understand. The government doesn’t make anything, produce anything, sell anything, or engage in any rational economic behavior. In fact, by definition, any dollar it spends is either a dollar it took from the private economy via confiscatory taxation, or a dollar it borrowed and will have to be paid back by taxpayers. Consequently, the more dollars coming from government spending, the fewer dollars available for more productive purposes in the economy.

  Figure 10.2

  Figure 10.3

  Two things must be said about this reality, and each will likely irritate one side of the aisle or the other. First, simply because government spending is “unproductive” in an economic sense does not mean it is illegitimate. Government has a legitimate function, and those functions have to be paid for. Second, to deny that money gets used more productively in the private economy is to deny the fundamental tenets of free enterprise and the profit motive.

  The percentage of the economy being encapsulated by government spending is a huge concern for many reasons. For example, military spending as a percentage of the economy has shrunk rapidly since the 1950s. We saw a temporary increase in the 1980s for the Cold War and in the 2000s for the two wars in the Middle East. But the percentage of government spending has stayed below half of its previous levels, even with those two periods. Right now it is only one-third of those prior levels. How has government spending exploded as a percentage of the economy while the military spending portion of our economy has been dramatically reduced?

  The answer is the increase in transfer payments. In fact, if we spent no money on anything but transfer payments, w
e would still run a deficit in this country. If we had no governmental departments, no salaries, no military, no debt interest, no programs—just Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, Unemployment, and so on.—we would still be in a financial hole (fig. 10.4).

  Figure 10.4

  *National Priorities Project, Federal Spending: Where does the money go, 2015

  There can be legitimate discussions around what has been acceptable government expansion and what has not. But taken in a macro sense, our government has grown beyond anyone’s comprehension in the last fifty years, and conservatives, at least, are frustrated by the inefficiency, bureaucracy, and staggering fiscal implications. I am on the list of those frustrated by the inefficiency, bureaucracy, and fiscal implications, but none of those things sit atop my list of concerns with bigger government.

  What Should Bother Us Most

  The vast majority of the conservative Right directs its ire at the unsustainable debt and entitlement trajectory (at least it did during the Obama years). The big government spending and deficits beginning with the Bush presidency and continuing into the Obama presidency gave birth to the Tea Party movement, which focused on the need for fiscal responsibility. As I said, I agree that to leave our children and grandchildren this kind of debt is a dereliction of duty. But alas, neither the expansive bureaucracy nor the fiscal recklessness of government is the cause of my most intense ire. If some sort of private sector “sugar daddy” paid off our national debt, I do not believe we should be happy in any way, shape, or form. Here’s why: The size of government is not the cause of the problem. It is merely a symptom. The size of government is a directly inverse reflection of the responsibility and initiative of the people. We should be most grieved by the absence of self-government in “we, the people.”